Twenty percent of the nation’s greenhouse gases come from automobiles. So it should come as no surprise that traffic reduction strategies can help reduce the amount of CO2 cars inject into the atmosphere: the less time spent driving a car, the less pollution it emits.

Nowhere has this been made clearer than at LA’s own Port, officially titled the Port of Los Angeles and Long Beach. In 2005 city and state leaders, concerned about the amount of pollution — and traffic — generated by the hundreds of trucks lining up to offload cargo at the port, set up PierPass Inc., a non-profit company tasked with reducing that back-up. How? By charging more for peak hour deliveries and pick ups at the port, typically between 3 am and 6 pm. Between 6 pm and 3 am, there’s no fee, providing an incentive to companies to schedule their traffic for later hours.

The result? Traffic around the port, especially on the 710 freeway, was reduced by 24% during the day, and the Port quickly met and then exceeded its GHG reduction goals. To learn more, go to this earlier Opportunity Insights post about the port.

Traffic Reduction Means Traffic Control

Part of the secret to this success is the use of sophisticated software and support systems developed by VESystems, a company based in California. VESystems provides the back-end logistics for managing truck traffic flows at the port — the nation’s busiest, with about 35% of all sea-borne container traffic that comes to the US.